1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic apparatus such as a personal computer and a program storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Personal computers (hereinafter abbreviated as PC) are widely used in homes as well as offices in these days. One widely known form of the PC is the so-called notebook personal computer (hereinafter abbreviated as notebook PC) that has a body unit including on its top surface a keyboard and a glide point which detects a touch of a finger or thumb and a movement of the finger or thumb touching the glide point, and a display unit that can cover and uncover the body unit and includes a display screen. When used, the display unit is flipped open and held at an angle with respect to the body unit; when not used, the display unit is flipped closed so that the display screen is placed over the keyboard.
Increasingly higher levels of security are demanded of electronic apparatuses such as PC today. For example, a fingerprint sensor that detects fingerprints is provided on a notebook PC as described above, the fingerprint pattern of a fingertip is read by using the fingerprint sensor and, if it is determined that the read fingerprint pattern matches a fingerprint pattern registered beforehand, access to the notebook PC is granted. This makes cumbersome password authentication for security easy compared with a technique in which a password is inputted through a keyboard. A number of techniques for controlling access to PCs by identifying fingerprints have been proposed.
For example, a technique has been proposed in which the fingerprint pattern of a fingertip is obtained through use of a touch pad consisting of capacitance detecting cells arranged in a matrix and, if it is determined that the fingerprint pattern obtained matches a fingerprint pattern registered beforehand, access to the PC is granted, and a cursor or pointer on the display screen of the PC is controlled with a touch of the fingertip on the touch pad (see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 11-353107).
Another technique has been proposed in which a position sensor that detects the coordinates of the position of a finger and a fingerprint sensor are provided, information about the coordinates of the position of a finger detected by the position sensor is used to control a cursor on a screen, and information detected by the fingerprint sensor is used to control access to the PC (see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2002-352234).
Yet another technique has been proposed which uses a capacitance-type sensor array to detect both of the fingerprint pattern of a fingertip and a movement of the finger and thereby implements both of the function of authenticating personal identification and the function of a pointing device (see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2003-298689).
Yet another technique has been proposed in which the fingerprint pattern of a fingertip is scanned and the amounts of rotation and movement of the finger are detected by using a simple circuit configuration (see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-272458).
Some notebook PCs, which are one type of electronic apparatus, include a glide point, left and right click buttons, and scroll up and down buttons provided between the click buttons. In these notebook PCs, four types of scroll operations can be performed by using combinations of the click buttons and scroll buttons.
In some known notebook PCs that include a fingerprint sensor, the fingerprint sensor includes a line sensor that detects the fingerprint of a finger or thumb placed on the line sensor and orthogonalized to the line sensor. In such a notebook PC, the fingerprint sensor, in addition to functioning as a detector of fingerprints, uses information indicating an upward (or downward) movement of a finger on the fingerprint sensor in order that fingerprint authentication can be performed to control access to the notebook PC and an image on the display screen can be scrolled on the basis of the information indicating the upward (or downward) movement of the finger on the fingerprint sensor.
However, the above-described notebook PCs that enables four types of scroll operations through use of combinations of the click buttons and scroll buttons has the problem of poor usability because one of the buttons must be pressed while another of the buttons is held down in order to perform any of the four scroll operations.
In the notebook PCs that include a line-type fingerprint sensor described above, an image on the display screen can be scrolled up by moving a finger upward on the line-type fingerprint sensor or be scrolled down by moving a finger downward. However, the notebook PC also has the problem of poor usability because, in scrolling up (or down) the image on the display screen, the scroll bar on the display screen can be moved upward (or downward) at a time only within a distance corresponding to the length of the fingertip and the user must move the finger upward (or downward) on the line-type fingerprint sensor a number of times in order to move the scroll bar upward (or downward) over a long distance. The line-type fingerprint sensor also has a problem that the scroll bar cannot be moved from side to side.